Floppy Drives--old school question

[pgulliver]

I'm about to buy a 12" AlPB, but want to make sure that I can read/write floppys that can be shared with Wintel machines, as I often have to work overseas without access to internet or even a LAN and need to have an ability to rapidly share files with collegues working off of Wintel notebooks. I saw on the Apple website that you can buy a 3rd party portable drive for $49.99, which is great, I don't mind the expense. I just need to know that it will READ and WRITE to a format Wintel notebooks can also read. And I couldn't find any info to confirm this online.

Thanks.

 

[evildead]

yes

Yes it will, you dont have to limmit your self to the one on the apple site. Any exteral floppy that says its Mac compatable will do. The best thing to do is to get DOS formatted floppys or, just format them with a PC. If you stick it in the A: drive and try to access it it will ask you to format it if its not DOS. Your mac will beable to read and write to any DOS formated floppy .... and your windows user colleques can use them too

 

[pgulliver]

Thanks

Thanks Evil Dead. So essentially Macs and Wintel machines are fully compatible. Who'd have thunk it.

 

[strider42]

Re: Thanks

Originally posted by pgulliver
Thanks Evil Dead. So essentially Macs and Wintel machines are fully compatible. Who'd have thunk it.

sort of. Macs can easily read PC disks with no problem. PC's cannot eaisly read mac disks. Thats why it was recommended to format the disks in PC format.

 

[rainman::|:|]

Yes, Apple supports all standard formats like Windows, but Microsoft refuses to add this kind of support-- they don't want you to be able to be compatable. There are 3rd party programs that let you use Mac disks on a PC, but they don't work well...

With OS X, you can also network to almost any platform, including Windows, quite easily...


pnw

 

[Adurbe]

The only thing Apple havent done yet is allow reading of Linux or NTFS HDD formats....

For me this means I have to keep my external drive in FAT32 for both systems to use it

 

[benixau]

Originally posted by paulwhannel
There are 3rd party programs that let you use Mac disks on a PC, but they don't work well...

i remeber one i used to get stuff off an older LC630 disk. it was really good. drag drop etc.

oh well, one day macs will be the be all and end all.

then ms WILL read HFS. MWAHAHAHAHA